Today I started to tidy up my music CD collection. I need to catalogue them and convert them into MP3 so I can play on my computers and MP3 players.One of the things that I wanted to do in my retirement was to enjoy my music collection.
Even though I was interested in hit songs for only a few short years in my youth years, it made a long lasting impression on me throughout my later life. I got interested in listening to hit songs around 1962, in my Form 2 year in a Hong Kong high school called King’s College. It was an English immersion school. The elementary schools in those days were Chinese based, so all of us had to struggle to learn English fast. One of the best ways we found to learn to speak English well was to listen to western hit songs and try to sing them. One could not sing them well if one’s pronunciations were no good. At that time, it was a very popular thing to do for school kids in “English schools “ in Hong Kong. I was just one of them, but I soon began to get fascinated with these songs. I truly loved the music and the lyrics of these classics. But I had to thank these songs to improve my English.
In 1965, our class had to do the School Certificate Exams. And then in 1967, we had to do the University Entrance Exams. All Hong Kong students would understand that these two exams would more or less determine their entire later lives. Hence, I was very concerned about them, and so I gradually gave up listening to hit songs during those years and never pick them up again until only a few years ago.
So I only had a few years of “exposure” to hit songs in my early years (from 1962 to 1967), but those years coincided with my golden youth years and I still remembered very clearly each and every hit song that I learned to sing during those years. In other words, listening to these hit songs would bring back the beautiful memories of my golden youthful days.
It so happened that those years were also the peak years of the Beatles, so naturally they were my favorite. I loved each and every Beatles song that was produced during those years. But I also remember many beautful songs by othe rsingers, such as Elvis Presley, Connie Francis, Doris Day, Nat King Cole, Paul Anka, Patti Page, Petula Clark, etc. etc. I loved them all.
At my retirement dinner (see blog March 23) , the technicians who were under my supervision gave me an album book of Beatles CDs as a gift. At first, I wondered why they chose Beatles, as they must have hundreds of other modern music artists they would love to listen to. In my opinion, only rusty oldie Baby Boomers would be interested in Beatles. However, one the technicians, whose name was Chris and he was a great music fan (he looked like a rock singer), said to me that he believed Beatles was the best band ever. I figured he was not even born yet when Beatles sang those songs. Hence, it looks like I was truly lucky to be there when the Beatles-maniac hit the world in the 60’s.
Traveller's space 